Why I Love LL

A sampling of Lewis Lapham's Notebook column, entitled "Crowd Control," From Harper's, October 2004, p.10:

Free-speech zones (I and XIV):
Cages or fenced-off spaces in which citizens remain free to voice objections or display signs critical of a government official or policy. Anybody who expresses a contrary or insulting opinion beyond the designated perimeter is subject to arrest on charges of "disorderly conduct."

Whenever President Bush travels around the country to praise the freedoms for which America presumably is famous, the Secret Service sends advance scouts to set up the protest pens at a sufficient distance from the presidential speech or motorcade to preclude the possibility of the disturbance being seen or heard. At a Labor Day event in Pittsburgh in 2002, a retired steel worker was arrested for walking around outside the free-speech zone with a sign saying "The Bush Family Must Surely Love the Poor, They Made so Many of Us." So also a man in Columbia, South Carolina, that same year found in the wrong place with a sign saying, "No War for Oil."

Prior to the Democratic National Convention last July in Boston, the National Lawyers Guild filed suit arguing that the free speech zone (a wire cage draped in black mesh) resembled "an internment camp." The presiding judge agreed that he couldn't conceive of a space that was "more of an affront to the idea of free expression," but, fearing for the safety of the convention delegates, he declined to shift or enlarge the venue.

Winston Smith is cowering in his corner in our near future.

I've seen these "free-speech zones" more and more of late. I first encountered them in NYC during Clinton's 50th birthday shin-dig at Radio City Music Hall, when tens of thousands of protesters were kept penned up blocks away from Bill and Hill and their adoring fans (not to mention away from the sensational media coverage). The Mall in DC is criss-crossed with these pens, so it's difficult to have a mass protest without everyone becoming compartmentalized. Fucking bullshit. Note that this erosion has been continual since the '70s, and Clinton accelerated it post-McVeigh. Now Bush is ramping it up even further.

If you don't have a lot of time, buy the new Harper's and read Lapham's elegant summary of the findings of the National Lawyer's Guild report entitled The Assault on Free Spech, Public Assembly, and Dissent. If you want the Full Monty, you can read it here.